Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah talks with Eric Simons, co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz. The company has experienced explosive growth since the launch 2 months ago of Bolt.new, an AI application that lets users prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack applications directly in the browser. Eric talks about the years-long journey that led to overnight success, why so many non-technical users are forming a community around Bolt, and the democratization of coding. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EricSimons40 Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:36 Bolt.new 2:04 How Bolt stands out from other coding assistants 3:28 Building beyond ChatGPT wrappers 6:13 Driving growth through community 9:42 Evals 13:29 Eric’s favorite use cases and startups leveraging Bolt 17:10 Why engineers are embracing no- code tools 24:32 The years long journey of StackBlitz 31:50 Balancing an Ironman, a newborn, and a product launch 35:18 Predictions for developers and code generation tools

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Sarah Guo?

  Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Eric Simons, the co-founder of Stacklets and the makers of Bolt New, a new AI tool that enables everyone, from developers to designers to non-technical folks, to build full-stack, real applications entirely in their browser. Eric has spent the last decade and a half thinking about how to make development more accessible, and since its launch, Bolt has taken off like lightning. Is it over for site builders? We'll talk about AI code generation, creative community, and if everyone really wants to build websites. Eric, good to see you.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Good to see you too, Sarah.

• 0:39Sarah Guo?

  You have had a wild two months since you guys launched Bolt New. Can you explain what it is? Like 0 to 20 million of ARR? I have, I don't think, ever seen that sort of crazy growth.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't either. It's been kind of surreal. It's kind of far beyond any of our expectations here.

• 1:02Sarah Guo?

  So for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, what is Bolt?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Bolt is, it's kind of similar to ChatGPT or Claude, except you use Bolt to build full-stack web applications. So you can come and just prompt, if you want a landing page, a blog, or even like a, you know, any type of full-stack web app where you have authentication, you can log in. And, you know, you can use it effectively, instead of going to like a web development agency or shop, you can come here, put in your idea, hit enter, and get a real production website for you. If you look at the world, there's, you know, 25 million developers, I think globally. And, you know, today, you know, we, last week, we had, you know, almost 200,000 software composers, you know, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications. And we think, we think that that number should be 100 million. And, you know, and we're on this growth clip.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  It seems like, you know, maybe, maybe we'll get there sooner or later. Bolt is really enabling folks to, to build real software, not just kind of drag and drop sort of. Static sites, you know, the previous era of how the web was made.

• 2:02Sarah Guo?

  There's a lot of code generation tools out there. You can do this, you know, directly in the core model products as well. What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. What's special about Bolt, and it kind of comes to the origins of our company, but you know, in short, we've written an operating system and web assembly that can like run in your browser. And that's really important because if you want to run dev environments, you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains, right? Whether it's NextJS or V or anything else. It's very complicated and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers. So it's very valuable to like do it in the browser because it's extremely fast. There's no latency. You're not paying by the minute, you know, for some cloud. What we've done has kind of married these frontier models with this technology we've been making. And when you kind of look at the other stuff in the market, there, there's, you know, like Claude Artifacts is, you know, probably one of the first things that hit the market that did a really good job of this,

• 2:58Speaker 01

  where you could say, hey, build me a UI and it will like do it. The problem comes when you actually want to build stuff that's more meaningful. Like it's very good if you're saying, hey, like, yeah, I use a, you know, Claude, you know, every week. You're just kind of generating graphs based on numbers or whatever. Very good for that sort of use case, but if you want to say, hey, pre-day landing page where people can log in and like do some type of functionality. You can't go npm install, you know, Firebase or Superbase or whatever have you and plug all that up and actually deploy it. That's what Bolt specifically is, you know, uniquely capable of doing without any other setup. It's just all kind of baked in.

• 3:29Sarah Guo?

  A common engineer, investor, tech person pushback. Hey, like these code generation tools are often the same. You guys have this web container technology that allows you to, you know, abstract away the backend and allow that to run locally without handling that developer environment mess yourself. There's this concept of like a GPT wrapper company, right? And so I think there were a number of companies that were less generously, like some system prompts and like a well SEO'd website. You guys open sourced your system prompt, so, and like a lot of the code for Bolt. Can you explain that strategically?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  As we were building Bolt, um, yeah, I mean, over the past couple of years, there's been a ton of more simple sort of wrappers that have come out, you know, around these frontier models. And the problem is like whenever the next model comes, whenever, you know, whether the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever,

• 4:33Speaker 01

  those companies, you know, kind of tend to go away pretty quickly. So when we were working on Bull, I mean, one of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years and it's like pretty, pretty difficult stuff to do. And so when we were going to build, to actually launch Bull, when we were building the system prompts and kind of use your interface around it, when we looked out there, there's not a lot of other folks doing this where they actually could open source their system prompts and kind of open source their products. So you could see how it's actually made. And for us, you know, we just, we felt that it was inevitable that someone would, you know, get our AI model to dump out our system prompts anyways, but also we felt there's kind of something missing in the open source world where we see,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  like we come from a web developer platform, right? Open source is key for innovation for everyone. And to date, a lot of these companies in the AI space have been looking at their system prompts and kind of their specific, you know, glue code is the secret sauce. And it just seems there's a whole lot that was being left on the table by not just putting this stuff out there and letting people fork it and improve it and contribute to it. If we're going to build a great business here, what's going to allow us to win is, is, you know, growing extremely quickly, building the best end-to-end product experience that really works incredibly well. It's not going to be, you know, the system prompt, kind of a, you know, for those who have done web development, it's kind of like view sourcing on a webpage. Like you can go to google.com, you can view source.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  No one so far has kind of done that and built another trillion dollar company that took out Google by doing that, right? You can learn a lot, but it's not actually, you're kind of building this cohesive end-to-end product business experience is a totally different thing.

• 6:14Sarah Guo?

  Why is the community valuable to you? I mean, you've always been like very committed to the developer community and to open source, but have you learned anything from the community that improves, as you said, the end-to-end StackBlitz system? Or is there like an ongoing way that happens?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  100%. Yeah, this has actually been one of the most interesting things for Bull. I mean, StackBlitz, the company, we've been investing in open source a ton over the past, you know, five, seven years or whatever have you. When we, when we put Bolt out in open source, we were really curious to see, does anyone find this valuable? You know, the answer was like, yeah, actually. And There's kind of a couple of, couple of key things kind of worth calling out on this. You know, one, from a general community standpoint, for, I would say just AI tools in general. One of the biggest problems that a company like us has, that's building an AI experience with AI models, and heck, even the AI labs themselves, is educating folks on how to best use the tool. Because the problem with AI models is that they're non-deterministic.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  It's not like instructing someone, hey, here's how you send an email on Gmail. You hit the compose button, you type, you hit send. If you go to a chat product, prompt, you know, prompt engineering is something that folks have to be educated on and learn how to, you know, use properly because it costs money every time you send a message. And so one of the interesting things I think we've done a good job of is really investing in the community and having it be a place where folks are sharing their knowledge on how to best use the tool. Because that's actually, you're going to see a lot of churn in your product if folks are coming, can't figure out how to use it and leave. And we're finding, we are learning, we are actually, not even the experts on how to use our own product at this point, are power users that actually know more.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And so we're bringing them on live streams to actually show, hey, what's working for you in your workflows. It's to the degree that we can, you know, upstream what they're doing by typing prompts into the product. We're doing that. So I think from a, if you're building an AI tool, it's critical to be building out a community and actually be directly engaging with them and like giving them a place to share their knowledge. Because otherwise, everyone else on the product is, there's going to be a high amount of churn, which is exactly what you've seen happening with these AI apps. Churn on these things can be like 60, 70% for folks that are not doing what I'm describing. And that's kind of like, that seems to be the most common case with a lot of AI applications that are kind of in their earlier stages, it's just crazy high churn rate.

• 8:36Sarah Guo?

  Oh, I was just going to draw a parallel to what David Holtz had done and the Mid Journey team overall. In that I think that the fact that there are like obsessive, creative, really capable power users of Mid Journey that are teaching the entire community how to use Mid Journey models and demonstrating like what can be created is like a huge part of their position versus like the many other image generators that are out there. And so that I think is just an interesting parallel.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's an excellent example and probably the best example that I've seen. There's surprisingly not a ton of, at least very visible examples of this. But I think it's going to be extremely important. I think for the company, especially the startups, that they really want to win big here. This is, I mean, just a critical, more than ever, right? More than ever, I would say. Community strategy and real investment is, is going to be key for success in building this, this type of product. You know, and user base.

• 9:43Sarah Guo?

  You guys are what, like 10, 12 people right now?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, like 15 to 20. I don't know what the exact number is, but.

• 9:49Sarah Guo?

  15, okay, to 20. That's, that's better. I'm a little out of date. I think the, like, the idea of like, let's have 200,000 plus users and growing be using this every week. And tell us what works in a world where like, there aren't evals that are, you know, from academia or, or standard that are useful in terms of like, what real world applications can you build with your system? Right? And so I, I think that, that virtuous cycle seems really powerful.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:24Sarah Guo?

  And you guys also, like, I think a big part of the Bolt theory is like, make anyone a developer, right? Versus you guys are all developers. You also need to see how non-technical humans build with this stuff.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. That's like, the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, are, you know, non-technical. And it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams. So think like entrepreneurs, PMs, et cetera, because it turns out kind of managing an AI is extremely similar to managing actual software developers, right? And one of the things you just mentioned on the eval. So this is actually the, this is kind of the second piece regarding. You know, how like, why are we open source? And one of the most interesting aspects that's popped out of it is that, like I had mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of good open source AI tools today, like real world AI tools.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And especially ones where products that clearly are providing a lot of value to the degree they're growing quickly. And you know, both by revenue and usage, we're like maybe one of, you know, the only, the few, or something like that. What's kind of happened is that, as you mentioned, the eval suites are, were very good the past couple of years of kind of generally measuring, how good are these models at coding? But the problem that folks are kind of running into now, when you talk about building a real world product around these things, the eval suites that exist today are very specific and not representative of like, hey, I want to go build a landing page. I want to build XYZ. There's nothing in there that, in those suites that can, you can actually test against. And so what's ending up happening is what's going on with our open source version of Bolt is Bolt Local is becoming kind of like,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  one of the main ways people are testing out new code gen models when they're coming out. Like I think there's a, you know, one that was released by Nvidia recently, and there's one called Form that was released recently. And you know, some of the folks like, I think over at like Hugging Face have been, you know, basically just, you know, one of the first things they're doing is taking Bolt Local and you're dropping that in saying, okay, how good is this thing? Versus Sonnet three, five or whatever, right? And so that's been kind of an interesting, it reminds me for those that were like into video games in like the 2000s. If I, if you, you know, can it run crisis, right? Like as far as measuring your PC performance, like it's, it's kind of becoming that. People are, you know, asking, okay, can this run Bolt? You know, like how, how well can this run Bolt? They drop in like, okay, you know, yeah, can't really do da, da, da, you know?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So I think, um, I think that's to me, one of the most interesting things that's going on as far as the open source side and the community there for us. And we've got some stuff we're announcing on that end that's going to kind of further bolster this. But I already it's, it's, it's, there's, there's kind of some benchmarks being set up around this thing where the latest, the latest AI models have a way to actually get tested in, in a real product that's, that's actually pretty sophisticated. With, you know, use cases, they're not just, hey, can it, can it write hello world, you know?

• 13:23Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, this very well specified Sweet Bench problem, right?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:29Sarah Guo?

  I think it would be useful just to paint a picture of like some of your favorite use cases of things people have built that you feel like are real, because that is definitely, I mean, correct me if you feel differently, that is a new development this year that you can use any sort of code generation tool to get to a useful application in any sort of end to end way.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  100%, 100%, yeah.

• 13:51Sarah Guo?

  What's your favorite use case? What are people building that's cool?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  What's really cool to me is folks are actually able to build real world products. And then so, you know, we've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing. You know, they've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like you're charging on Stripe or whatever have you. So a couple of examples, just off the top of my head. One is from this gal in Thailand. She's a PM in a software banking company, and her company is viralhooks.ai. And so she launched this project, you know, by herself on the side, just moonlighting it. And the product is actually pretty cool. So the general idea is, you know, when you make like a TikTok

• 14:36Speaker 01

  or something, I'm not a TikToker, but you know, I've had aspirations. When you make a TikTok, you need, you need to have like a viral hook to kind of get people to keep watching, right? And so she's actually trained up some models, you know, from OpenAI or whatever have you, to actually help you write great viral hooks for your videos, kind of reverse engineer how their great creators have done that. So you can go check it out, viralhooks.ai. And so what was kind of mind blowing, and it's a beautiful site, like awesome product. And what was mind blowing about this is a week before we launched Bolt, she went onto Upwork and listed this project, said, hey, I want to build this product, dot a dot, asked for quotes on the thing. She got a quote for $5,000 from, I think it was

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Devon, like Ukraine or something, estimated timeline, two to three months, right? It seems like, considering the app I just described, kind of reasonable.

• 15:26Sarah Guo?

  Sounds cheap, honestly, for what it is.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a pretty, like, not, not a bad price and not a, not an unrealistic timeframe. And the next week, Bolt came out. She signed up for our $50 plan, and in two weeks, she had built and launched the entire thing. The cost savings there, I mean, it's a 99% reduction in cost from 5,000 to 50. And then a five times faster delivery, you know, two weeks versus, you know, months. And the alpha is just like insane, you know? And, and this is not, it's not actually like a one off case. Like she was, I think, I think the first person we had chatted with that had done this and then another guy named Paul, he launched an entire CRM called Shield CRM. He's just been on a tear making a ton of different types of tools. But like, and this is like fully featured CRM, like calendar, contacts.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  He has a chatbot built into the thing, you know, an AI chatbot, et cetera. Same deal, like he actually, he's been running web dev agencies for I think like 20 years. And so, you know, to, to build the CRM he made, he was like a $30,000 quo. And he did on our $200 a month plan, you know, in one month, right? So again, same sort of cost savings, et cetera. So I think a lot of, a lot of folks, uh, you know, especially in the web dev shops, et cetera. They're just, they're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients. Uh, and are able to charge the same price, right? And so, yeah, there's, there's, there's, there's one tweet I saw online where, uh, one, one of these folks was like, this is, uh, this is the most incredible arbitrage opportunity in web development ever.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Uh, and it's true. I mean, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. So I think what's really cool is just seeing people, uh, be able to like take their ideas, launch them into reality for a fraction of the cost way faster than ever before.

• 17:10Sarah Guo?

  I have, um, for a number of reasons, uh, been long-term skeptical of like no code tools in the traditional sense, right? Like a GUI based editor for people to build, uh, simple applications or more complex applications in a closed ecosystem. I'm just like, ah, like for anybody who's coming from engineering, that's really scary because I'm basically trapped in your platform without the ability to leverage the entire developer ecosystem, the open source world, like frameworks, uh, anything we, um, might need.

• 17:49Sarah Guo?

  Because I don't know where the bounds of your system is like, how do you, you, you clearly believe that there's some version. I mean, it is working, but like there's some version of no code and development for non-developers that is going to happen. Like what, what changes? Like why, why should it work?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point. I mean, and to be clear, like, you know, like six months ago, I, I shared the same viewpoint and, you know, and maybe even like three months ago, I would have, I've shared it. But there's some, some key things that, that have meaningfully changed. And just from a technical perspective, AI code gen models, there's a tipping point, specifically with, with Sonnet three, five, there's a chasm that's been crossed here. As far as AI models are, have gone over the tipping point of being good enough to really write real applications that are like production grade. And it's only going to get better from here. But this, but up because you know, kind of it's some inside baseball. Earlier this year, I think like in February, we had the idea for Bolt. We tried to build it with some of the, you know, frontier models available at that time.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Wasn't possible to do. The, the models were, just did not spit back quality, accurate code that was constantly breaking, which ruins the experience. It doesn't work, right? So we put the project on the shelf and then once we kind of got an early preview of the new Sonnet stuff, we're like, wow, this, okay, this is, this changes everything.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  And so I think, you know, if you kind of think about these no code site builder things that existed today. The only reason that, that, that these existed, they had to make, you know, custom wissey wig gooys and stuff. Is because how else can you get an end user that's not tactical to like, turn their idea into code? The best middleman tool or interface to do that to date was like drag and drop Wix style sort of stuff, which comes with all the problems you just mentioned, lock in. How do you expand this? Like, how do you, you know, it's like, you want to actually, do you add real development to this at some point? How do you do that? Right? And so these things kind of be these, you know, end up as these wall,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  you know, ecosystems that can't really get mainlined into building real stuff on top of, you know, over time. That changes now because of this, this tipping point in the AI models. Now the best interface, I mean, we have people coming to, to Bolt that, you know, like with, with the week we launched, we had a salesman, I think from Dallas, that he tweeted us and said, thank you so much for making this tool. You know, I use this to make a website for my daughter because she has like a medical condition. She has to find donors as she travels. And so she, I made this websites for her so she can send it ahead of, you know, her travels. And it's, it was an incredibly touching use case, but I, my first thought was like, Should I tell this guy that like Wix exists?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  You know, like there's other things that can do this. And then I I realized, you know, Wix and in Squarespace are really complicated to use. Like the only time I've used Squarespace was for to build my wedding website back in 2021. At first I wanted to do it myself. I'm a developer. And so I was like, honey, this is important to me. I need to build this thing. And I I spent a Saturday on it and it wasn't done. And you know, I'm running a startup at the same time. I have other things going on. So she finally just bought an account and said, make it in this thing. And, you know, it's it's it's pretty complicated. Whereas you compare that against Bolt, it's it's a text box. You say, hi, I'm having my wedding on this date. Here's the details, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Here's the RSVP, hit enter, boom, zero shot. There's there's a production website ready for you. Right?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  And like to degree, my my 71 year old mom built and launched her first website ever. Two weeks ago. Yeah. And so it just kind of goes to show like it's way simpler, right? To build a real and then the stuff that's being the code that's being punched out is is, you know, the same stuff that developers would work with. It's like NextJS or Remix or Astro or Veed or whatever have you. So and what's actually happening right now in the community is as folks are trying to do more and more complicated stuff, they're raising their hand in our Discord or on Twitter and they're saying, hey, is there anyone who can like come and help me debug this or build this thing out? And folks are like by the hour saying, hey, yeah, you know, book a time with me and, you know, I'll I'll come and help you develop this thing, et cetera.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  So it's kind of this really beautiful mix of the best of both worlds that's happening. Right? So I think that to me is what's changed. What's changed is like AI code gen has gotten good enough where you can go and take your ideas, put them into your fingertips, hit enter, get a great result. And for things where you need to bring in actual professional developers to tidy up or fix bugs or really expand, you know, more difficult capabilities, they can. Because it's it's like any other code base that they come into. Right? So I think it's a very, very.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Interesting and and kind of mind blowing point in time because yeah, I don't I don't think anyone saw this coming, you know, years ago. So.

• 22:39Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I I find that very inspiring because I think that there are plenty of entrepreneurs or even just individuals who like are not one of the 25 million professional software developers in the world, but want to make software or have a web presence of some kind. And and this is the first time they can do it in a way that like to me makes sense where I'm like, okay, if you if you succeed or you in lots of actual like existing professional engineers use Bolt too, but it is because it's not a dead end, right? Because like you can go, you know, iteratively do development or even use the the Stackblitz ecosystem of developers or whatever over time, which is which I think is like step function different.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and for existing devs, I mean, it's like this is just like every other developer tool or innovation, you know, the past 20, 30 years. This is just allowing them to focus on on the actual high value work that they do, you know, it's just it's it's kind of not worth their time to punch out a UI, you know. And so that's that's what they're coming here to do is just rapidly iterate on on UIs and pull in data, etc. And and some folks, some developers just using this as a primary way to launch their startups or whatever. Or if they if they need to pull it into cursor, they do that and they can bring it back to Bolt, you know, they can kind of use the best of both worlds. But certainly for non technical people, this is huge. That was an interesting thing that we learned, actually, is there's a there was a large, there is and there was and is a large number of people that have

• 24:04Speaker 01

  been downloading cursor that are not developers because it let them meaningfully dip their toes into kind of like clicking accept change, accept change, accept change from the AI. And when we first launched Bolt, I mean, there's just, I mean, there's still, there's still common all these YouTube videos that are like cursor and you know, Bolt kills cursor. And we're like, that's where they're two different products, you know. But to non technical people, they they, you know, they aren't. It's actually like this is this thing solves the problem of me not being able to code and etc.

• 24:33Sarah Guo?

  Maybe we can back up a little bit and just talk about like Stackblitz and the story as a company.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Sarah Guo?

  I think it's very funny when companies suddenly have overnight success, right? Because it's like, oh, well, they were, you know, Notion was working on. Developing their point of view and trying different ideas to refine it for five years and then they made Notion. And you guys have been working on this for, you know, five plus years as well. Like, can you talk a little bit about like the the origin of Stackblitz and you and Pi and like, when when you decided to do both?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I co-founded Stackblitz with one of my childhood best friends. His name's Albert Pi. He and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago together. And when we were 13, we had ideas. We and I were always very interested in computers. We were building PCs. And we wanted to learn how to write web applications. This is like the mid 2000s. So like for our 13th birthdays, we asked for, you know, the O'Reilly books because they're like 200 bucks a pop instead of an Xbox, you know, and we learned how to code together. And really, and it was painful. I mean, at that time, there was not like Codecademy and all the stuff that's for free online. There wasn't really online communities around these things. But he and I really wanted to, we had, we thought we had cool ideas for products or whatever. And and we really wanted to build them and launch them. I think, and that's really, I think,

• 25:53Speaker 01

  that's, that's why, you know, we've been building stuff together for, you know, 15, 20 years. It's been about that. You know, coding was really a way to, you know, a necessary part of how you bring these things to life, you know? Anyways, fast forward, Albert and I have done a couple of different startups over the years. But back in 2016, 2017, we had this realization that browsers had gotten really powerful. Like, we've been building web apps, you know, at that point for a decade and a half or so. And we had this realization that the browser had gotten really powerful. And it had hit this new inflection point where you could actually basically like run an operating system in a browser tab that was like really fast, etc. And and that was really

• 26:35Speaker 01

  cool. Because that means that you could actually use the web to build the web. If you look at every other platform that's ever existed, that's been an important capability of, every platform that's ever succeeded in a meaningful way. You know, Windows can build Windows apps, Macs can build Mac apps. The web does not have a built in way to do that. So there's kind of this nerd instinct of ours. We were like, this is important. This is, this seems very valuable to solve, right? And so we kind of set out to go and do this. And part of this was that like, we had actually seen this story play out, you know, six, seven years earlier with Dylan Field and Figma. When they, their first pitch for Figma,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Was not like a design tool. They didn't have a design tool. They had a demo, like a WebGL demo of a 3D ball dropping in. And the pitch was what browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful 3D graphics rendering. And that because that is true, that means you can build a design tool that's lives entirely in the browser. That was the pitch. And that was that we saw that same sort of story playing out for web development. Browser gotten powerful enough to run entire development environments in a browser tab.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  That means you can build, you know, an entirely new product experience that's web native and share it instantly. You know, it can be viral because there's no cost to spinning at the ends or something. Incredible experience, no latency. So that was really the origins of it. And, you know, we built in, you know, the technology took us, you know, four years, I think, to build end to end. It's called web containers. We hired a couple of people on, specifically one, one guy in particular, Dominic Gellman from Germany, has been leading the engineering on that project and now our AI stuff. But, you know, really, we got to the, you know, I think we're doing like three million developers a month using Stackblitz today. And that and the original product was, you know, if you imagine web development prior to, you know, the AI revolution, how do you do it in an IDE, you know?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  So that was like, it was basically VS Code in a browser powered by our web container technology. And became pretty popular in the open source world and then for enterprise from use cases.

• 28:37Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I remember when we first met, I was lucky enough to also be an early investor in Figma. And, you know, just believe in the power of the web and see the gap that you described without knowing what the actual valuable product was. I think, you know, this, this era is funny because there's been, it's sort of longstanding wisdom that nobody ever makes money on anything that looks like an IDE. Doesn't, doesn't feel exactly true anymore. But I still remember like my first impression of you was, like we, we met and I was like, oh, this guy seems like a cracked engineer and then he really seems to care about the web. And then also like there was like real, even the first company was like a.

• 29:23Sarah Guo?

  It's some sort of like JavaScript education thing, like a Codecademy precursor thing. I was like, okay, he's like committed. He like has the authentic understanding of community, having grown up on the web himself. But the weirdest thing I remember was I was like, I Googled Eric and the previous company name and whatever, and you were like, living in an AOL building because it had free food and showers. And I was like, okay, this person is insane, but at least it is a like high, high beta bet.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that, um, yeah, I was, I was 19, so I'm, I'm, I'm 33 now. So I spent, it's been a minute.

• 30:00Sarah Guo?

  Do you have a house? Do you have an apartment now?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  I have a place to live. I've got, I've got a, a, a dog and a daughter and a wife. So, you know, we gotta, living out of an office building would be tough, I think, with, with this whole crew. But yeah, yeah, I was, I was 19. I came out of Silicon Valley. I, yeah, I came out here with literally like $0. Was part of this, this incubator called the Magic K12 that ended up getting picked and picked up into Y Combinator itself. And they had, you know, access cards to get into AOL. Cause at that time AOL was trying to reinvent themselves and get startups in the building, et cetera. And I think they shut that down after the press story about me came out, but sorry about that, everyone who was going to AOL. Um, yeah, I, I was bootstrapping this, this K12 educational company. And, um, you know, I, I, you know, I'd run out of money. And, um, so I was sleeping on couches.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I was going to the AOL gym every morning, taking a shower, literally eating kind of the leftovers of the, when teams would order food in and put it in the fridge and they were done with it and they would get thrown out. I would eat it. There's a quote from me in the article at the time, pretty sure it was a dollar a day. I think that's why I got my burn rate down to, um, which, which was pretty wild. Uh, but yeah, that's, that's, um, that's kind of my origins, uh, in Silicon Valley.

• 31:12Sarah Guo?

  Well, it's nice to be working on, uh, you know, a cash generating business now, right?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 31:20Sarah Guo?

  But you're still, you're still nuts. I remember like we were, we were talking, uh, maybe. Maybe six months ago, maybe seven months ago. And like, honestly, like, the company was in a bit of a tough place, right? Like, you weren't about to run in, run out of cash anytime soon, but it was unclear what the growth-oriented revenue generating product would be. And you're, you're running a bunch of experiments. I remember you also being like, oh, yeah, well, I, I, you have to tell me what the original reason to do this was. But going from that to we're going to launch this new product, I'm going to run a marathon, I'm not a runner. I guess I'll do an Ironman, too. Like, what are you thinking, man?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  It's a good question. A lot's changed in the past seven months. But yeah, I mean, I think.

• 32:09Sarah Guo?

  Oh, you had a newborn? Sorry, I forgot that.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot, a lot has changed. Yeah. And so I think at the beginning of this year, I knew that I was, you know, I was going to have a daughter in April. And anyone that's been a parent, you know, will, has, you know, will tell you that's, it's stressful, especially the first months of life there.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And at the same time, on the, the business side, I mean, I think us and everyone else in our space was having a tough time. And we were, we were no exception. And we were kind of looking at the future and, you know, kind of, you know, looking, where do we fit in here? Things are changing really quickly. And, you know, a lot of, a handful of the other folks in the space have either gotten acquired or, or shutting down or whatever have you. And some have actually kind of gone and leaned into the AI stuff in a similar way to us. So very, a few, a smaller number. But, um, you know, there, there's just, there was kind of storms on the horizon. And there, there's this, this quote, um, you know, I think it comes from the military.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  But, uh, you know, fate whispers to the warrior, you can't weather this storm. And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. And, and so it's just kind of like, you know, and that'd be my general advice to anyone is like, if, if the universe is going to try and crush you, just make it try harder. And, uh, so I think back, right after my daughter was born, um, you know, one, one day I woke up and I, I was like, I'm going to do an Ironman this year, like a full Iron. I don't know why. That was just kind of thought hit my head. And, um, yeah, so I think it was like six months from then was when the full was going to be, which is in October, um, just like a month ago. And, um, so to do that, you know, two weeks after that, I had, you know, I never ran a marathon before, never had, I'd never done all the things that are in an Ironman.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It's like a two and a half mile swim, 110, 112 mile bike, and then a, you know, full 26.2 mile marathon. I'd never done any of that. And so a couple of weeks after I had the idea for the Ironman, I just went and did a marathon with my brother-in-law. Um, and then, uh, you know, it's just throughout the summer, which is training and ended up getting, um, coached. So he had formerly been on the US Olympic team for this stuff. And so I think it was like two months from when I was gonna go and do the Ironman. He was like, this is a, this is a bad idea. You should not, you shouldn't do this. He was like pretty concerned about it and, um, uh, but he, he, he had some really, you know, really, uh, great points on where I need to improve, et cetera. And so, uh, in October, I did it.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  I did the, I did the whole thing and, um, God, I think I was in the top 25% of all the people that finished. And, um, that was pretty wild, but, but yeah, yeah, that's, that's just, uh, that's kind of how I approach problems in my life.

• 34:44Sarah Guo?

  You make them harder.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just you kind of bring full intensity, especially like when, if there's things that are mentally stressful, having something like some physical challenge is an incredible way to balance out. Cause you, you, the intensity you bring to you can kind of feed off of it from both sides. It's right as, as when I was running the Ironman was like two weeks after Bolt had came online and it was, we were scaling up at a crazy rate. So it was, it was just, that was nuts, uh, kind of what was going on then. But, um, but I think it kind of kept me safe, you know, during that time. And I think it was important, you know, as far as getting this thing online. That's, that's how my brain works at least.

• 35:18Sarah Guo?

  In terms of inspiring others that may not yet be prepared to commit to the, the Ironman with the newborn and the product launch, what do you, what do you predict in terms of like what we can imagine for developers or for code gen? Maybe just for the next like six, 12 months, because I think past that in AI is really tough.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  The one thing that I'm, I'm very convinced of is that, you know, to date, a lot of the AI code gen stuff has been like tab completion, sort of like line completion stuff, things like cursor taking a little bit further. Agentic workflows are, are here. Um, and you know, I think Bolt has been one of the most visible ones that's, that's really, really worked well. I think we're going to see a lot more of folks, uh, there's like this kind of this term being thrown around of like software composer. I think, I think engineers are gonna, um, more and more just be instructing these things at a higher level than just, hey, tab, complete this thing. And it's like, hey, go and do X, Y, Z and send it off, you know? So I think that's going to be a major one.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And I think the other thing too, and this is, this is a big part of the reason that we, we made the bet on Bolt was that. I've got a lot of conviction that AI models are going to get better at code gen specifically. And it kind of makes sense. Like you kind of, you know, we kind of look at the other things that folks are trying to use AI for in their product or are using successfully, I should say. One of the hard things about training these models is obviously like, how do you, how do you, you need to get more data to train it and, you know, to improve it over time, but it has to be accurate. Like, you know, and it's hard to do that for things that are not easy to be deterministic about. When it comes to software, it is. It's either this thing, this code you wrote executed without errors or it didn't.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  This thing actually created a landing page. You can, you know, capture an image and, you know, analyze, et cetera. And, and so I think when you look at what the, the frontier AI lab are doing, they're doing the best job of this stuff. It's their mission is to just go and, you know, create every permutation of every application you could ever build, put it into the training data and make these models incredible. That strikes me as obviously a very long tail goal there, but I mean,

• 37:25Speaker 01

  just for what we have now, it's unbelievable what can be done and it's only going to keep getting better. So I think that's the main thing is, you know, for, I think folks have been kind of concerned about, are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera? And no, I don't, I don't think so. Um, like in the, in the specific realm of code gen, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot of improvements pretty rapidly, um, which is what we've been seeing over the past year.

• 37:48Sarah Guo?

  Okay. Awesome. Um, I think that's a great note to end on. Uh, thanks, Eric, for doing this.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This has been a blast.

• 37:58Sarah Guo?

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